Stop Offshoring
Google
Monday, November 15, 2004
 
Will Bush re-election open the offshore floodgates?

Here are some selected quotes from the article:

U.S. firms had been holding back on their offshoring plans until after the electoral winner was decided. With President Bush's victory -- and the perception that he is friendlier to free trade than his former opponent John Kerry, who talked of "Benedict Arnold CEOs" and suggested ending tax deferrals for firms that shipped jobs overseas -- Kenney believes companies will lose their "wait and see" attitude and roll ahead with their plans.

"A lot of firms were wondering if the election would give them a government more skeptical of offshoring,' Kenney said. "But now that Bush has been re-elected, those firms are thinking about what the next stage is and how much they should move overseas.
"In the next five months, I predict we'll see a new burst of announcements."


Executives with Indian outsourcing giants Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. have both stated publicly that Mr. Bush's win means that offshoring can continue unabated.


On a different note, my new employer is proving to me once again what a catastrophe offshoring really is. This is the third company I've worked for that has outsourced software development work to Indians, and in every case, the company would have been better off keeping the work themselves, or even not having anyone else do the "work" being done by the Indians at all, because they cause more problems than solutions.

In my current project, we divided the responsibilities for implementing some web-based screens so that two Indian programmers were coding three of the screens while I coded the other four. (Why it takes two Indians the same amount of time to complete three screens total as it takes me to complete four by myself is another issue entirely!!) After they handed their work back to us, we found that the screens didn't work at all. We could not even get one to open! Apparently, it only works on the one dataset they developed with! I wound up spending another week to re-create two of the screens and making major bug fixes to the third. It would've been better if I just coded everything myself. At least I wouldn't have needed to spend time testing their screens and figuring out why they didn't work.

Another engineer here had a similar experience with the developers in India. She spent two long nights at the office debugging some SQL scripts that the Indians wrote. She said she had to re-write them herself because they were so atrocious. She couldn't believe anyone could check into the source control system such buggy code and claim to be done.



Wednesday, November 03, 2004
 
Say hello to 4 more years of offshore outsourcing.
Say goodbye to good American jobs.
:-(



Powered by Blogger